An interview with Jenna Moynihan, a fiddler and an extraordinary member of the Boston music community. Jenna performs with harpist Mairi Chaimbeul, the Seamus Egan Project, the Hanneke Cassel Band, and has appeared as a soloist at Symphony Hall with the Boston Pops. In addition to touring, recording and teaching at fiddle camps, Jenna is also an Assistant Professor in the String Department at Berklee College of Music.
Jenna Moynihan: https://www.jennamoynihan.com/
Bandcamp: https://jennamoynihan.bandcamp.com/
Mailing List: https://www.jennamoynihan.com/schedule
The tune for this week is Brenda and Bill's a slow reel by Jenna Moynihan and Mairi Chaimbeul from the album One Two.
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
An interview with Jenna Moynihan, a fiddler and an extraordinary member of the Boston music community. Jenna performs with harpist Mairi Chaimbeul, the Seamus Egan Project, the Hanneke Cassel Band, and has appeared as a soloist at Symphony Hall with the Boston Pops. In addition to touring, recording and teaching at fiddle camps, Jenna is also an Assistant Professor in the String Department at Berklee College of Music.
Jenna Moynihan: https://www.jennamoynihan.com/
Bandcamp: https://jennamoynihan.bandcamp.com/
Mailing List: https://www.jennamoynihan.com/schedule
The tune for this week is Brenda and Bill's a slow reel by Jenna Moynihan and Mairi Chaimbeul from the album One Two.
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
Welcome to the Fiddles Studio podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wolvis-Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of the tune Branda and Bills by Jenna Moynihan and Mari Campbell from the album One Two. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking to Jenna Moynihan. Jenna plays Scottish fiddle, but also a lot of other kinds of fiddle. I pulled a quote from Daryl Anger who called her one of the best of new generation of freestyle fiddlers. So that gives you some idea. She lives in Boston. She teaches fiddle at the Berkeley College of Music that she attended as a student some years ago, and she also teaches around. You'll find her at camps and weekends and she has albums. I could go on and on. She collaborates with all sorts of famous folks Owen Marshall, daryl Anger, hanukkah Castle you were just down in my area with Hanukkah and Keith Murphy, I know. Yeah, welcome Jenna.
Speaker 3:Thank you, hey, meg, great to be on your amazing podcast.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. Well, jenna and I have kind of a cute meat story we do, because I was at the String House, which is where I purchased my violin in Rochester, new York, owned by the Kinect family and there was a teenager fiddling trying out bows in another room and I was drawn Like a moth to the flame and it's like who's playing in there, right, do you remember?
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, oh, I remember Actually I still, that's still the bow. I used that bow that I got that day.
Speaker 2:Oh nice, she was fiddling. She sounded really good and I immediately was like hey, can I get you to come to my camp? Can you come and help out with the kids? And we, like you, came that next year. I think you're about to leave for college, yeah that summer, yeah, and I was like, yes, I was 18.
Speaker 3:That was my first real camp teaching at and I knew and, like just the world to be a little smaller, that meet cute was you had given my cousin Suzuki lessons for a time years ago, so I knew that you existed. I knew that there was this like a fiddle player in the Rochester area, but I had never met you. And it was great because sometimes, you know, if I go in a classical kind of, you know, there's like the Knapp Shop where I've also gotten my instruments and bows, and then you go in and play fiddle tunes, sometimes I'm like, oh man, they're probably I don't know. Just someone walks in and they're like what is this character up to? But just having someone be like, yeah, fiddle, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:I was excited, I was too, yeah, and I was like, oh, I kind of fill us in on, so that was your 18 and going off for Berkeley. So what happened before that that brought you to be playing fiddle and getting ready to embark and studying it so deeply, yeah, Well, I just started taking Suzuki violin lessons.
Speaker 3:I think I was seven or just about seven. I had really wanted to play the violin but my parents, at worst first sort of like, well we have a piano and your older siblings are playing the piano, so it's time for your piano lessons, and it was just a no thank you for me. And then there was only one violin teacher in the town. So I in the town I grew up in, which is Lakewood, new York, and so I was on a waiting list for a little while and I finally got got in with a wonderful teacher named Sue Tillerson and, kind of by chance, getting into the fiddle stuff. A couple of years after that she was getting into fiddle tune, scottish tune Someone had given I think someone had given her CD, maybe a book, and so she was finding those tunes exciting and sharing them with us. And then a few of us us being the children of the Suzuki school were really excited, you know, really loved it. And I remember going to a Highland games I suppose nine or eight, and doing a fiddle workshop with a then teenage, jeremy Kittle, and so, you know, learning tunes. I think we had learned some tunes ahead of time we learned some tunes when we were there in the workshop and that was just, like you know, fireworks for me and yeah, that was it. I loved it, love the tunes, so that's. It does seem like it's just kind of by chance, like so many things, I suppose. Yeah, so then I mean we had this small community that was really spearheaded and nourished by my Suzuki teacher, sue, and we'd have a little fiddle club. We'd go to workshops if they were within some striking distance, and that was the case for a few years. And then I started going to fiddle camps and that was another kind of big firework moment of, yeah, getting to be kind of at the feet of all my heroes and learning from them and meeting a bunch of other kids my age and all that who are excited about the music. What kind of camp. The first camp that I went to I was 12, it was a big birthday present, a big surprise. I was just enamored with Natalie McMaster. Still am, still am. But yeah, just there was. Just. When I see quick aside, when I see sort of like the hype and fandom around Taylor Swift, I get it, because that is how I felt about Natalie McMaster when I was 12 years old, I just I could go on another podcast. So my dad had found out that she was teaching at a camp in San Diego Marco Conner's fiddle camp. So that's how I ended up going there. Going there, I totally had tunnel vision. I wasn't really interested in what anybody else was doing, except for Natalie McMaster. But it was a multi-style, multi-genre camp and all kinds of great folks that I met for the first time. And then from then on it was just. I went there a couple more times.
Speaker 3:I went to Swannanoa in North Carolina, I went to Valley of the Moon, alistair Fraser's camp up through high school and then going to college. So going to those camps was really huge for me. I really only got to do like one a summer because they were always far away. There was nothing was ever close or easy to get to for me, but hugely inspirational and encouraging. Yeah, so I get. Yeah, that's I've rambled, but I think I've pretty much gotten to being, you know, 18 and then going to college. Yeah, Camps, cds, workshops, listening to my recordings that I made at the camps, all those things got me through every year until I got to go to the next thing, next camp.
Speaker 2:And was your focus? Scottish fiddle specifically.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that that was my yes, that was what I started doing, learning Scottish tunes. I did a couple Scottish fiddle competitions when I was just starting with it, but you know, natalie McMaster was a huge influence, chris Cape Breton, which is very similar and, yeah, has a lot of they translated right to each other. But, yeah, I mean first, that was the thing, that was what I had the most access to I guess to begin with, and that's not to say like I was also playing some Irish tunes that are just claimed by everybody. Yeah, and I would go to sessions, like sometimes when I would come up to Rochester for a family event, go to a session, or I'd go to a session in Erie, pennsylvania. That was kind of more Irish, but maybe, since we were kids, they let us play our Scottish tunes in the sessions. Just encourage us. Only kids, only kids, exactly. They're just like oh, look at them, go, why are they playing a stress bay here?
Speaker 2:So Scottish fiddle you're the first Scottish fiddle I know. You play more styles now For people who really maybe only know about Irish or old time fiddle, what is Scottish fiddling? What makes it different? I know some times I'll listen to a Scottish fiddler and a lot of what I hear will sound like Irish. But there are definitely. There's a different kind of rhythm and vocabulary.
Speaker 3:Yes, so, scottish fiddle, you're right, like I think, from the outside, if you're hearing an Irish tune and a Scottish tune back to back, it's kind of hard to tell the difference. I remember not really being able to tell the difference for a while as I was learning, because they're so similar. There's definitely rhythms that are a little bit different. I think one of the most obvious differences is in Scottish music there's the Scotch snap, which is where you'll definitely hear it in a Strasbe type of tune, type of dance tune. That's very and actually I mean you can hear that rhythm a lot in like pop music. Now too, the Scotch snap it's on the radio. We've made it.
Speaker 3:The Scottish fiddle is also influenced by the Highland bagpipes, whereas of course there's bagpipes in Irish music slightly different, different tuning, different notes. So they're emulating a similar thing, but then the nuance in that is very specific. Of course you get in the weeds with it. My friend Hanukkah, a great Scottish fiddle player. I've heard her describe Scottish music and Irish music being quite similar to the landscapes of each of these places. So Irish music you can think of these rolling hills and this is a terrible example.
Speaker 3:But Scottish music being jagged, like there's like rocky cliffs, that's a totally broad example. But, yeah, the way the melodies are also flowing sometimes is different. But within that there are tunes, yeah, that are played by both styles and both of them claim them. Or there's a tune that's a Stras Bay in Scotland but it's a real in Ireland, but same tune, yeah, it's a mess.
Speaker 2:So you went to Berkeley out of this Scottish background doing these camps for many years and I guess what I'm most curious about your experience there was just it sounds like you were playing a lot of tunes that were given to you by other people and in a style that you were learning from different teachers. So I think somebody who listened to you now would find you're playing really unique. So somewhere in there you kind of moved away from other people's tunes and kind of other people's exact ways of playing and you found your own voice. I'm curious is that something you feel like happened at Berkeley or happened afterwards? It's so unique how you play the fiddle, yeah, I think probably both.
Speaker 3:So I went. I wanted to study play music in school, I wanted to keep going with music and I was also really excited about living in a place where there was just in a city that had a great scene for trad music or acoustic music in general. So even if I hadn't gone to Berkeley, I was thinking, maybe I'll just go somewhere in Boston or end up in Boston, or for a little while I thought about going to Scotland or something. So that part of it was a big draw and it was something that I had. Yeah, I think I was really ready for to be immersed in it. But from Berkeley was one of the places one of the three places at the time and maybe it's changed a little bit now but where I could go and not go to a conservatory or not have to be trying to play classical music, which not nobody needed to hear that. But yeah, there wasn't. I didn't go there to study Scottish fiddle or Celtic fiddle, even by chance, the year that I started, which was 2009,. That was the first year of something called the American Roots Music Program, which was started by Matt Glazer at Berkeley, and so that was the focus on all these bluegrass, old time blues, certainly Celtic music, that big umbrella of Berkeley kind of saying that we value this, we are going to put energy into this, and at that time already a bunch of great fiddle players had already gone through Berkeley and more were coming, and not just fiddle players, banjo, you know. There's like you can study banjo there, you can study the mandolin. But again, that was just when I arrived. I didn't actually know that that was a thing when I had applied and all that. So that gave me access to unexpected access, you know, to bluegrass and old time particularly and in general, improvisation, which was new to me.
Speaker 3:So I spent the time that I was there. I was there for four years and I was doing a lot of things that I wasn't comfortable doing. I didn't think I would be doing necessarily, and being influenced by a lot of things that hadn't even been on my radar, which I think is probably for the you know like, you think you have this plan or you think you like know what you're going to do, and then it's not that. So, yeah, I mean, I took a lot of lessons with Bruce Mosky, like just learning all time, learning all time, bowings, and it wasn't none of this was like intentional like, but it all just, it just seeps into how I was thinking about music or how I was playing music or how I was phrasing something, and I'm glad that it was actually. You know, I think I would have had a really different experience if I went and just somehow studied the thing that I already knew, that I liked, Because at the end of the day, I think I still the Scottish Celtic fiddle lens is still kind of how I experience music and that's, or how I create music.
Speaker 3:I think that's kind of always the strongest voice that I have. But yeah, I was exposed to a bunch of other things and I have tried to do them as authentically as I can when I'm learning them. And then, of course, when I'm playing, I'm not necessarily putting on a hat and trying to be like the most traditional, whoever fiddle player or from wherever tradition, because I'm I didn't grow up in a tradition, which I always was sad that I, you know, or I always wondered like what if I just been, I don't know, born in Cape Breton or something? But it wasn't. And so I've always, you know, I'm always kind of an outsider to these traditions too, to a point.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. I think a lot of people, the music that's coming out of them is some kind of mixture of like whatever their roots, their old habits, their old like grooves, but then also more recent, found myself just kind of the music that I've been playing and hearing over the last year has a big influence, and yet I'll always sound like that little kid playing Portland Fancy and Chorus Jig New England. I can't really sound not New England. They play an Irish tune. They're like sounds, yeah, you almost have it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally. I mean, if I play an old time tune, it's still like, hmm, what was that? What was that little thing you did in there? It's like, did they do it? Yeah, I think it's also great to be like rooted in something. I mean, especially now we can be, we can hear and have access to so many styles of music that even like streaming music or YouTube, those things weren't happening when I was growing up playing, and so it meant that I had the CDs that I had. I knew about the people I knew about, and you go to a camp and you're exposed to new things, but that's kind of. I wasn't really exposed to that many new things beyond like that one week a year, you know.
Speaker 3:But there's something to be said for going really deep with sometimes scarcity of what you have, I think, can be a strength, and for a long time that was. I think that that was kind of the case. I'm glad that I always had that touchstone to return to, rather than just like, oh, anything is you know, because everything is possible and that's to me completely overwhelming and will freeze me out to do something if everything is. I imagine that probably is like for some folks could be very inspirational, but for me it's just a panic room.
Speaker 2:No, it's funny. When I would stream all my music I had like a echo or something. I found myself not listening to a wide variety and so we threw that out. We just use the record player and because I have my parents old record collection and also my kids get records, I listened to much more variety of music so interesting, whereas before I had the world at my fingertips but I just didn't know where to go with it.
Speaker 3:So it's too much, I think. And yeah, just like learning all of a record is cool. What's a record you learned all of? Oh, so many. I mean all of Natalie McMasters. In my hands, my roots are showing live both discs. I had the Blaze and Fiddles the first two Blaze and Fiddles records. I love them so much. I think they are. If you haven't heard those. There's so many good tunes on those records.
Speaker 2:I was learning, like all of Wild Asparagus, like everything that, beatrice, I think I was sitting there just writing the tunes out and playing along with the thing. I was obsessed.
Speaker 3:Yes, and it's great to emulate what you love for a long time. Like that's how it ends up, kind of being natural. Or like, oh, where does this ornament? I've learned how to make this ornament, but I don't know where to put it. I mean, I think for me I'm just like such a it's all feel, it's all feeling. Like I have like a feel great about that sound or that track, Like I will listen to one track for days and days and days.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's not really like oh, I should learn, I should do this. I don't do, I don't do anything when that's how I feel, but it's just like the emotion of whatever that track or whatever that player makes me feel and just sinking really deep into that. And then it starts to be like, yeah, you get to take and be inspired by that kind of flourish or that kind of, I don't know, hearing someone play with dynamics, and then it just it's not as calculated Okay, now I'm going to do that here but it just seeps in and it's. I think that's how this music is supposed to be passed on anyway. Right, you hear it, someone plays it and you think you're kind of playing it like them, but you're not. You're playing it like you influenced by them to some point.
Speaker 2:And it's an amazing moment when you figure out that the music that really moves you emotionally or that really sparks you, that you can do that. You know, when I see a student and they're playing something or learning how to do something and they're playing the chords behind it, they hear that like mine or something they're like oh, you know, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to find, or finding your own voice doesn't just like I don't know. It's not just like oh, there we go, Now I just decided that I would have my own voice and now I have it. It's not, it's a long following what you care about or what makes you feel that feeling of hearing music. I mean it's like, yeah, I don't know how to describe the feeling, but I think everybody knows yeah, that's what you should follow. I mean that's. There's no guidebook exactly except for like what you like and then See if you can get even deeper with what you like, and then it will probably lead you somewhere else. They didn't know that you were gonna go.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, jenna, I of course, saw you teaching many years ago 15, 20, it was a while, yeah and you were great back then. The kids loved you, and I've seen you teaching recently, and so I know that you're around teaching a lot and you teach At Berkeley what do you teach there?
Speaker 3:I'm at Berkeley, I'm teaching, I teach private lessons and I'm teaching an account to consenble nice and Worlds can be both very interesting, and working with you like where can they find you?
Speaker 2:Normally do I like camps usually do, or what's coming up this summer?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, my website is a great place to find information and I have a newsletter, which comes very infrequently, which will say much of the same information on my website.
Speaker 2:The website is Jenna Moynihancom. It's yours.
Speaker 3:I'll be yeah, be it swan and Noah Celtic week. I'll be Some, yeah, other camps. I play a lot with Sheamus Egan project. I play with Hanukkah Castle. I do all kinds of stuff, hopefully kind of working on another album slowly for myself, yeah, yeah, how's that slowly? It is slow but it's coming. I mean, it's been almost 10 years since I made my other solo record but I do so much playing in other people's projects, yeah, I wondered Specifically about that because I see that you do a lot of things Mm-hmm and collaborate with singers and bands and other musicians.
Speaker 2:I was curious especially since you say that your album is coming slowly like how you balance Working on other people's music and also like finding time to work on your own music.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say that Up until more recently I probably really wasn't balancing it because I wasn't really doing it much. I love playing in other projects and I love Collaborating and I love being a side person and playing this like I do. But I was also finding that I would get home from one of those things, or get home, you know, from a big expulsion of energy doing something and I wouldn't have any energy. Laughter.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't want to come and try to write something or all that and yeah, and the pandemic for me was not a time of creativity at all. I know for some people it was and, yeah, I mean, I so envy those people, but I will, I will tell you that it was not. I played a lot, I taught a lot and I did kind of different things, but it was not, it was not flowing. So I feel like I lost some time there and I also, and then I was injured actually of part of last year. So I lost some time there, which now gives me a little bit more of like a Appreciation for my own time and my own, what I, what I want to do. So I'm working on it and I just have, I've learned. Now I think that I have to carve out the time and protect that time, which might mean saying no to something that I would like to do, whatever it is. Yeah, life is long and Also sure, it depends on how you look at it. Yeah, well, I went.
Speaker 2:I went 20 years between albums, I mean so there you go, there you go.
Speaker 3:I know I used to joke and say like maybe in the pandemic I would just be like, oh yeah, 2025 is gonna be my year, just joking. And then I'm like my guess, right now I am, it's looking like 2025. I hope I don't know. I've made a lot of other music in that time. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it's, like you said, flowing, and sometimes it's not. I didn't think I would ever write music again. Then all of a sudden I had to. But I really had to carve the time out, like I took one day a week and actually, like Hmm, traveled away from my family for that day.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, that's important.
Speaker 2:I mean you think music would be more important than laundry, but in the moment you're like, well then, I have to do this laundry for me. I have three, yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh, totally, I don't know. I have no kids and yet I still I will let other things Not other not if it's someone else is, if I'm learning something for someone else, I will do that, like I will, that's the priority. But when that Shifts, it is funny how easy it is. So like, yeah, let everything else go first. And if you let everything go first, bad news, you're never gonna. There's no end to the to-do list. I think of life. Yeah, yeah, took me along. Yeah, I mean I'm still learning it. Take no prisoners. This is my time.
Speaker 2:Well, we have a tune. We do have a tune for today's and, and this album was just mentioned at my session. I think I think they were talking about the Impressive siblings of the Campbell family, hmm, and they mentioned Mari and they were like and she's on an album with Jenna Moynihan. I was like I know that is so. I guess the album is called one two and you play fiddle and Mari plays harp.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how, how did you guys?
Speaker 3:come to start working together. Um, we met at Berkeley actually. Okay, there you go. I guess we had a couple mutual friends in Scotland, so, you know, someone had reached out and said oh, Mari's, come, you know, I'm gonna start in Boston. She started, I think my yeah, my last year was her first year, so we were aware of each other and Just started playing tunes Casually, and then actually we Rehearsed for a kind of like a kind of background music gig that we got. You know, that was the first corner, exactly in the corner where we had had a reason to come up with some things and and that was that, and then just Lots more Collaborating over the next several years, and that's where we met.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, the tune is called Brenda and bills. Did you write it together or did you write it? How does it work when you? Yeah, we wrote it together. How does it work when you write it together?
Speaker 3:Um, I think in this case we knew that we wanted a tune that felt like this and we didn't have one that we already knew. So usually first we would think about some tune that we already knew, and I mean, I don't know how to explain, because we've there are a couple things that we wrote together on that record. Sometimes someone has a phrase and we might just kind of play it like meander together and my might be playing different harmonic ideas. That also can really, you know, help the tune. Oh okay, well, it could go there, which had been helpful to me because I can get really locked into like one chord or like two chords and just, and then someone opening the door of oh, then I'm like, okay, great, I can go there, and now there's a new melodic idea.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and sometimes it's been like we someone comes up with half the tune and then come up with the second half together, or we're like here's this first phrase, and then we might go off into other rooms and then come back and sort of like jam both of our ideas together or take this and take that, but with a kind of mutually, kind of agreed upon, mutually agreed on, like what we need somehow. You know, like somehow just looking for the same thing and looking for the same feeling, and then we would play it for 20 minutes and you know, nonstop, and just see if it's like is that right, you know? And maybe in that 20 minutes another little thing happens and you're like, oh, yeah, and all of that time, a lot of it would be recording on voice memo because, of course, something can go by and then it's gone forever. Yeah, and this tune was written.
Speaker 3:We had the tune before we had the name, quite a long time before we had the name, actually, but we this album was recorded at a friend's house in New Hampshire came out in 2017. She had let us use her house, this kind of she sort of had a gathering space where she did house concerts and it was a big, beautiful wooden room, and so we named it after our hosts, who let us make our whole album there, nice.
Speaker 2:What kind of tune is it? Is it a real? It's probably a slow reel.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I've never played it fast. I don't know what that would be like, but it's kind of like a yeah, a groovy little. I don't even know what it is. I say slow reel, but I would, if you think that it's something different, send me an email.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, it sounded like that to me, yeah.
Speaker 3:It's like one of those Brenda and Bills is a slow reel change my mind and then I set up a little gluce and wait until someone makes their argument, makes their case for why it's a I don't know what Well, we're going to listen to it, so we'll figure out what it is, and it's from the album one, two, and that whole album is you and Mari.
Speaker 2:It's all fiddle and just sweet Well, so everyone should look for Jenna online at her website, jenna Moynihan, and you're on Instagram too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's probably the most up to date social media thing. And the newsletter Newsletter. Oh, sign up for the newsletter. You guys, I get it, it's great. It's just it comes almost never, but when it does, sometimes I make you a playlist, sometimes I don't, and you get all the details.
Speaker 2:You get all the details. Yeah, right to your door, sweet. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 3:Thanks, meg. Thank you for having me on your podcast and for having me at your fiddle camp. Oh, it was many, many years ago Giving me a chance. Really.
Speaker 2:It was yeah, it was my first.
Speaker 3:It was pretty awesome.
Speaker 2:Oh, you sounded good in that violin shop. Thanks, I had to grab you. It was a good bow.
Speaker 3:It was a good bow, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudiocom, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.